The Road to Ever After Read online

  ‘It’s been full of incident, I’ll grant you that. I’m quite tired myself. Get our room keys from the man.’ Miss Flint gave him money to cover the room charge.

  The crowd at the bar was several deep and Davy had to press through with determination to get where he’d be noticed. On the TV above the bar, the movie had reached the bit where Clarence the old angel was explaining to George Bailey that every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.

  Hotly self-conscious, not wanting to sound foolish, Davy made himself raise his voice to claim the barman’s attention. ‘Can I have the keys to our rooms, please?’

  The barman gave him a hard look. ‘I got one room,’ he said. ‘For the old dame, not you.’

  Davy paid. As the barman rang the sale into the register, the cash drawer sprang open with a ding. On the TV screen behind the bar, Nick, the movie barman, was doing the same. He rang his cash register over and over, saying, ‘Hey! Get me! I’m givin’ out wings!’ Davy stared up at the screen.

  The barman slapped the key on the bar. ‘Oi! Looky Lou! This ain’t no picture palace. Door over there, top of the stairs.’

  Mr Bunting, the lawyer who’d paid their tab, was still sitting alone at the far end of the bar. As Davy headed back to Miss Flint, he called Davy over. His rumpled suit was rusty with age, his hair a tangle of frizzy, greying curls. Altogether, he was frayed around the edges, a shambling kind of man. He had a nice face though, Davy thought, open and calm. Mr Bunting sipped his drink, a root beer, through a straw. His bright blue eyes looked straight into Davy’s and Davy found himself saying, ‘Do I know you?’

  Mr Bunting smiled. ‘You look like you’re on your way somewhere. With the lady?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Mr Bunting regarded him for a moment. Then he nodded and began to search his pockets. He pulled out a coin and handed it to Davy. ‘Some places only take the old money,’ he said.

  The large copper coin was worn and bent, the markings almost worn away. It was like something from Miss Flint’s museum. Davy looked at Mr Bunting, puzzled.

  ‘Keep it handy, just in case. You never know,’ said Mr Bunting. ‘Merry Christmas, kid.’ He went back to his root beer.

  Davy stood there for a moment, then pocketed the coin, saying, ‘Thanks. Merry Christmas to you, too.’

  Davy didn’t quite know how he got Miss Flint up to her room. There was no handrail. The staircase was narrow and dark. He somehow had to pull and push her at the same time. He caused her pain without meaning to. She cried out sharply once or twice. He apologized over and over. ‘Just get on with it,’ she said. He didn’t want to think how he’d get her down again in the morning.

  At the top of the stairs, Davy unlocked the door and found the light switch. A naked bulb ticked into life. It was an attic bedroom, being used as storage for a lean-to of folded chairs, stacked tins of cooking oil and other things. The iron bedstead was made neatly with a blanket. An orange box hosted a bedside lamp. The blocked fireplace huffed cold draughts of winter into the room. The filthy window smeared the moonlight coming in.

  He helped Miss Flint over to the bed and clicked on the lamp. Their breath steamed in the chill. Her laboured gasps worried him, they seemed too loud. ‘You should probably keep your coat on,’ he said.

  Miss Flint pulled off her hat. In the harsh light overhead she was hollowed. Fragile as the dead sparrows he would sometimes find in the graveyard.

  Davy asked if she wanted anything. She waved him no. He placed her walking sticks within reach, said goodnight and made to go.

  ‘Briefcase,’ she said suddenly. ‘Painting. Photograph.’

  The first thing that Davy saw when he opened the case was the small brown pharmacy bottle containing her pills. Warning. Do not exceed the recommended dose, the label read. These were the pills she’d told him of. The ones she would use to kill herself. This was real. She could really do it. Impulsively, he slipped the bottle in his pocket.

  She gestured impatiently.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Yes. Here they are.’

  The painting was the one she’d shown him, of her old home by the sea, their destination. And he noticed the childish signature of the artist, E. Flint.

  The framed photograph was in beside the painting. It lay on top of a banded stack of money. The image had faded ghostly pale down the years. A boy and girl stood at the open door of that very same house. Two summer children like those in Brownvale who rode bicycles and battled giants as they outran the days all season long. He wore shorts. She wore a thin cotton dress. Their friendly arms and legs entangled as they smiled, squinting, at the photographer. A small terrier a bit like George sat at their feet.

  ‘Was this you?’ said Davy.

  She didn’t answer. ‘Just there, where I can see them,’ she said.

  He propped the frames against the lamp and put her canes within reach. By the door, as he went to leave, as he clicked off the ceiling bulb, he saw an old-fashioned call bell drowsing there.

  She said his name and Davy turned. ‘For the absence of doubt, I’m unfiring you. I need a driver,’ she said.

  ‘Why me?’ said Davy.

  ‘You sweep angels,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘Goodnight, Miss Flint.’ In passing, as Davy left the room, his arm brushed the call-bell cord and the bell gave a gentle little tinkle.

  Miss Flint picked up the photograph. She held it for some time. Then, from inside her briefcase she took a notepad and pen and, using the case for a desk, she began to write.

  Once she’d finished, she got herself up from the bed. Sipping hard for air between each effort, she made her way over to the door and opened it. Then she rang the call bell for attention.

  Davy woke at first light. He’d fallen asleep quickly on the bench seat of the truck, only to dream all night long. Unnerving dreams of sea-going coffins, flights of skeleton birds, and turkeys that grew on platters in the trees. His body was curled around the easy-breathing warmth of George.

  They sat up, yawning, in the fogged-up cab and Davy gave George the rest of last night’s hot dog. While he ate, Davy paged through Renaissance Angels, searching again for the forest scene that had appeared then disappeared. It wasn’t there. There was no warrior with his hound guarding a body.

  ‘I must have dreamed it,’ he said. That encouraged George to climb on Davy’s lap and lick his face.

  The crunch of tyres on gravel alerted them. Davy rubbed a peephole on the window. A police car was pulling in to the parking lot. It had barely stopped before the doors flew open and an officer leaped out. Mr Webb, the turkey farmer, heaved his bulk out from the other side. Davy ducked, slamming down the doorlock as he did. He grabbed his bag, and George, and dropped out the passenger side, thinking to lock that door too before silently closing it behind him.

  A surprising number of cars were still parked in the lot. A fair few of them contained the inn’s customers, sprawled on the back seats sleeping off last night’s revels. It meant he and George could dodge around the edge of the lot and stay out of sight of the two men who were now crouch-stepping towards the truck with clumsy furtiveness. As they rattled at its locked doors and peered in through the steamed-up windows, Davy and George slipped around the rear of the inn.

  The back door stood open. They hurried down a hall, past a coffee-rich kitchen that rumbled with idle chat and morning coughs. The main room was littered with the bodies of sleeping men, fallen soldiers on the battlefield of Christmas cheer. The chorus of snores didn’t falter as he and George tiptoed through the doorway to Miss Flint’s room.

  They found her halfway down the stairs, dressed in her hat and fur coat. Her eyes were wide with excitement. ‘I saw them pull in,’ she hissed. ‘I’m fine, you stay there.’ She moved with surprising haste. When she reached the bottom, she exclaimed, ‘My briefcase! I left it just inside the door.’

  Davy scampered up and grabbed it. ‘Follow me,’ he whispered.

  He had visions of running throug
h woods and shoot-out showdowns, like in the movies. If they left the back way, there’d surely be somewhere they could hide. But as Davy opened the door to the rear hall, a man began to stretch himself on the kitchen door frame, bowing out into the hallway, talking all the while.

  They hustled back the way they’d just come and soft-footed it through the main room. Mr Bunting, the friendly lawyer, was asleep on the bar. He snored with a rafter-raising gusto.

  Davy unlocked the front door and sidled out to take a look. Mr Webb and the policeman were attempting to jemmy the locked truck doors with a crowbar and a length of wire. Apart from shinning up a tree, which ruled out Miss Flint, Davy couldn’t see a single place to hide.

  ‘Mr David!’ He whirled around. Miss Flint was in the police car. George sat at her side. She motioned frantically for Davy to join them. He ran and jumped in behind the wheel.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ he said.

  ‘They left the keys in the ignition.’

  ‘Oh boy,’ Davy said. But he turned the key. As the engine switched on, so did everything else. The siren, the police radio, the blue light on the roof all began to wail and crackle and flash. The shock sent George into a fury of barking. Over at the turkey truck, the policeman shouted. The two men began to run.

  ‘Which way?’ said Davy. ‘Quick!’

  ‘Left! Go left!’ cried Miss Flint.

  He reversed the car and shoved it into drive to spin their nose around. Then Davy hit the gas. He slammed the pedal to the floor. They crash-bumped on to the road, fishtailed left and squealed off. And for the second time in as many days, Davy looked in the wing mirror to see Mr Webb yelling in red-faced disbelief. He and the policeman went running back towards the inn.

  ‘Oh man, we’re in trouble – big trouble,’ Davy said. ‘A turkey truck’s one thing, but a police car – this is bad, Miss Flint, this is wrong.’

  ‘Do as I say and we’ll be fine. For pity’s sake, what’s wrong with this contraption?’ The switches on the console were hissing and crackling, resisting all her attempts to flick them off. There was a flash as they shorted out in a shower of sparks. Alarmed, George leaped into the back seat. The roof light, the siren and the radio all went dead.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Now to get back on schedule.’

  How could she be so calm? His heart was jumping in his chest. ‘We stole a police car, they’ll put us in jail.’

  ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Mr David. They’d have to catch us first. You’re an excellent getaway driver.’

  A compliment from Miss Flint. That was a first. Davy glanced at her and blinked.

  Miss Flint looked entirely different.

  Her face, which had been a collapsed ruin of bones and hollows, was raised up and filled in and smoothed out. Her hooded eyes with their wrinkled lids, sunk so deeply in her head, were now open and clear and bright. Davy felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Did you sleep well?’

  He gaped, wordless.

  ‘Watch the road,’ she said. ‘And close your mouth, you’ll catch flies.’

  Davy looked away, uncomprehending. When he’d left her last night, she’d been ancient. Barely able to breathe. And it wasn’t just her face that was different. He realized how easily she’d moved as they escaped from the inn. So easily, he’d forgotten she needed help.

  She said, ‘We’re more likely to evade capture if you put on some speed. I slept wonderfully well, better than I have in years. That bed was surprisingly comfortable.’

  Her back was straight, no longer bent in half. Her voice had lost that grating old person wobble. A comfortable bed couldn’t possibly be the cause.

  ‘We’ll have to change our route. The police car is a complication. I think I know where we are.’

  George was in the front seat again, sniffing at her and whining. Miss Flint soothed him with strokes of hands no longer crabbed by rheumatics. It would take more than a good night’s sleep to remedy that.

  ‘We’ll keep away from the main roads and cut across country.’ As they flashed past a road sign, she told him to bear right up ahead.

  Davy kept stealing quick glances at her. In The Great Mancini, a hokey old movie about an evil magician, Mancini would lock his beautiful assistant in a box, make some passes with his hands and, when he opened it again, she’d turned into a dove. Davy was no magician. But last night he’d shut the door on Miss Flint and this morning she had emerged transformed.

  ‘We’ll get rid of the car just as soon as we can. We’re obviously not policemen – you keep staring at me, Mr David. What is the matter?’

  Davy tried to speak. He couldn’t. Slowly, with icy hands, he turned the rearview mirror towards Miss Flint.

  She went very still. She stared for some time. Then she touched her face in wonderment. Her skin and her lips. She took in the changes to her hands and moved her fingers freely, with widened eyes. Then she removed her hat and her long braid of hair tumbled down. What had been thin, white and wispy was now thick and fair, streaked with grey.

  George’s ears had gone flat. He whimpered.

  At last Miss Flint spoke. Her voice was faint. ‘I look sixty again,’ she said.

  Davy cleared his throat. ‘You were pretty nippy back there.’

  ‘I thought it was the excitement,’ she said.

  The three of them stared through the windscreen.

  ‘This is clearly impossible,’ she said.

  The hour was still early, the day just beginning, when they drove into a town large enough to boast a police station. The roads were empty, the pavements too. When they found the station, Davy cut the engine and they rolled into the car park at the back. He tucked the patrol car crookedly between two others. His excited driving along narrow country roads had left the thing filthy, with an array of dents and scratches. They left the keys in the ignition and hurried off. George was visibly relieved to be back on solid ground.

  Miss Flint dumped her walking sticks in the first rubbish bin they came to and strode along, upright and vigorous. ‘They’ll be circulating our descriptions by now.’

  Davy regarded her moth-eaten coat and enormous fur hat. ‘It might help if you got rid of that get-up,’ he said.

  She eyed him severely. ‘This “get-up” belonged to my mother.’ She came to a sudden halt. She’d just caught sight of herself in a window. ‘Good grief,’ said Miss Flint. ‘I look a wreck, why didn’t you say?’ She was already shrugging off the coat. Underneath she was wearing a skirt, pale pink blouse and short tweed jacket.

  ‘Come on,’ said Davy.

  Down the alley over the road, he’d spotted a donation bin for clothes and shoes. The contents had been squirrelled through and left on the ground. While Miss Flint crammed her bulky coat down the chute into its guts, Davy riffled through the pile of clothing. He found a pair of trousers and a blue shirt and, ducking behind the bin, changed into them quickly. They were worn, but not too badly. Slightly big, but they would do.

  He shoved the hated plus-fours down the chute and threw in his loathsome chauffeur’s cap. ‘Those are brand new,’ Miss Flint objected. His uniform jacket was warm wool, too good to throw away. Davy ripped off the epaulettes and shrugged it back on.

  ‘Right,’ said Miss Flint. ‘What next?’

  Davy’s stomach grumbled. ‘Breakfast,’ he said.

  As Davy left the drugstore, the bell above the door gave a tinkle. In the diner over the road, Miss Flint was on the alert in a window booth. She waved him on urgently. George sat beside the diner entrance, beneath a sign that read No Spitting. No Swearing. NO DOGS. He stood, beating his stubby tail hopefully as Davy approached. ‘Stay,’ Davy told him. He went inside and slipped into the booth.

  Miss Flint leaned across the table. Keeping her voice low, she said, ‘You took your sweet time.’

  ‘I had to buy all this.’ Davy cleared the table in front of him. His waistband was tight thanks to his enormous breakfast, the only evidence
of which was a swipe of ketchup on his plate and a tiny hill of toast crumbs. Davy dumped out the contents of the paper bag. A new toothbrush, tooth powder, soap, a nail brush and a comb. ‘I couldn’t just barge in and say, “If a lady starts getting younger, what’s wrong with her?” I had to work my way up to it. I needed this stuff anyway.’

  ‘Well?’ said Miss Flint.

  ‘He thought I was joking. Tore a strip off me for wasting his time. We need to find you a doctor.’

  She shook her head. ‘We’re wanted criminals, Mr David.’

  ‘But you don’t look anything like you did last night.’

  ‘They’d lock me up,’ she said. ‘Doctor, when I went to bed I was eighty. When I woke I was twenty years younger.’ She dropped her head into her hands. ‘How can this be? I don’t have a single ache or pain.’ She brightened. ‘What about those Manhattans? I did drink two of them, maybe they acted like a kind of potion. An elixir of youth. No. That’s desperate talk.’

  ‘You could say it was a friend of yours, that you’re worried about them,’ said Davy.

  ‘I have had one thought,’ she said. ‘Psychology. We’ve been gripped by a joint delusion. Our minds, I mean, both of us. I’ve read about that kind of thing.’ She raised an expectant eyebrow.

  A delusion. Both deluded at the same time. Davy gave it his consideration. If they were deluded, chances were they wouldn’t know it. ‘OK, so . . . how would that work?’

  ‘You’re right, it’s ludicrous,’ said Miss Flint. ‘But whatever this is, we need to know.’

  ‘Why?’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ She stared at him as if he’d just said he could fly. ‘Because this is impossible, that’s why. I’m on the verge of eighty. All living things age and die, that’s how it works. They don’t get younger. Excuse me, do you mind?’

  She glared her outrage at a man pounding the flashing jukebox next to their booth. It was taking people’s money but not playing their selections. The man gave it a final frustrated thump and, instantly, it went dark.

  ‘Serves you right,’ Miss Flint told him. ‘Playing jukebox music at breakfast only hastens the decline of civilized society.’